Digital recording and editing of sound and video images has become a mainstream tool for the preparation and production of audio and video publications in a variety of media industries. Editing functions, such as inserting, deleting, moving or copying, are easily accomplished by manipulating digital audio data. A visual representation of an audio waveform may be used in combination with audible playback of the waveform to identify desired audio segments. Conventionally, desired sections of digital audio sound tracks are marked, highlighted, or selected by placing a cursor at the beginning and the end of the section. This cursor, in a desktop or laptop computer system, is controlled by means of a keyboard and/or a mouse. Likewise, in video editing systems, visual representation of the visual media along with the associated audio data, is represented on the screen along a timeline. Desired sections of audio and video are marked, highlighted or selected by placing a cursor at the beginning and the end of the section. This cursor, in a desktop or laptop computer system, is controlled by means of a keyboard and/or a mouse. In both cases, the user creates a ‘mark in’ along the timeline, and then a ‘mark out’ along the timeline, in order to identify the section of audio, video, or both mediums, the user wishes to manipulate.
Such systems allow for very sophisticated editing of audio and video data files, but they are generally not intuitive and not easy to use on a mobile platform, and they are best suited to non-mobile computing platforms with significant visual display size. They are not well suited with smaller computing devices, such as a smart phone, personal digital assistant (PDA) or tablet or possibly even a netbook computer.
It is one object of the present invention to provide an intuitive audio and/or video editing system that provides such editing functions, as for example “Insert”, “Delete”, “Move”, “Copy”, “Paste”, by means of a smart audio cursor suited to touch-screen visual editing in mobile sound editing applications, and also through the creation of anon-timeline based system of editing and mixing, herein alternatively referred to as a method of manipulating or using ‘bungee blocks’ or ‘media blocks’.
It is known that broadcast journalists, podcasters, and other similar professionals, often need to record, edit and send audio recordings from remote locations, and whereas the current equipment is often unsuited for that task, being large, complex, overly expensive, and difficult to carry and use in a field reporting environment, there is a need for a small, portable, inexpensive and easy to use device to fulfill all of these functions.
Applicant is aware of patents regarding such audio recording and editing tools such as:
U.S. Pat. No. 7,167,763 titled “Method and apparatus for providing a graphical user interface for a player/recorder system”, issued to Claar et al. on Jan. 23, 2007, describes a player/recorder system with a computer based graphical user interface controlling one or more tracks of several audio channels. The interface includes two input display sections with many control boxes to control one or more tracks of audio input, and one track of audio output to control the resulting multiple track audio recording. The display includes a scroll bar to access additional control boxes than cannot otherwise fit on the display at once. This prior art is complex and requires display real estate, that is display area, that is simply not available on small format computing devices such as small, or pocket-size computers or smart phones or like small-screen processors. In addition this prior art is cumbersome, complex and not intuitive to the user relative to the present invention.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,151,998 and 5,204,969 titled “Sound editing system using visually displayed control line for altering specified characteristic of adjacent segment of stored waveform”, issued to Capps et al. on Sep. 29, 1992, and Apr. 20, 1993, describes both hardware and software for a personal computer enabling user recording, editing, and playback of sound. The sound editor user interface displays analog representations of digital audio waveforms, enabling a user to mix together several audio waveforms, and to modify the audio characteristics including pitch and amplitude of select parts of each waveform. Although simpler, using a rudimentary audio cursor (line segment), and more intuitive than Claar, U.S. Pat. No. 7,167,763, the Capps prior art is primarily a digital mixing device that consumes more display real estate than available on a small format computing device, and is in applicant's opinion less intuitive than the present invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,868,687 titled “Audio editor display interface”, issued to Penn, et. al. on Sep. 19, 1989, describes an audio editor comprising circuitry for converting a received audio sound recording into digital data blocks, where each data block represents a corresponding portion of the sound recording during a predetermined time interval. Also included is circuitry for storing the data blocks as a consecutive sequence representing the sound recording. A video display is provided to show the data blocks as a timed based graphical representation to a user. Also provided is a method of displaying the sound recording including the steps of (1) converting the received sound recording into digital data blocks, (2) displaying an axis representing time, (3) displaying a graphical representation of the digital data adjacent to the time axis corresponding to the relative time position of a corresponding sound recording portion in that time period, and (4) displaying at least one user locatable mark on the time axis representing a time point of the sound recording. Editing is performed by character and function key sequences to mark copy and paste audio sequences from source audio blocks to an output recording. Again the display real estate required is significantly more than that found on small format computing displays, the character based editing does not take advantage of a touch-screen interface, and the editor is not in applicant's opinion as intuitive as the present invention due to use of English commands as compared to iconic operations.